Finding the keys to the future…and trying not to lose them in the mess.

In all the writing I’ve done about food storage, I’ve mostly left the topic of freezers alone. This may seem strange, because freezing is the most frequently used technique of food storage in the developed world – if most people preserve at all, they often do it by freezing things. The first is the ecological impact of encouraging people to have freezers, the second, the economic impact of relying on one. I tend to think that other methods of storage are better choices – but it is worth asking when a freezer is a good idea.

The two major objections to a freezer are that generally speaking, food kept frozen would be better kept by other methods of preservation. This is not true across the board, of course – for example, let’s say that you have an electric stove, coal fired electricity, and you happen to be the owner of a super-efficient sunfrost freezer, and you mostly use your freezer to preserve foods for less than 3 months – in that case, it might be more efficient to freeze.

On the other hand, if you have a gas stove and an old freezer, the odds are good that it is almost never more efficient to freeze things than it is to can or otherwise preserve them. As is always the case, the environmental impact of things is complex, even in and of itself.

And the actual question of whether canned or frozen chicken is better isn’t really all the answer – there are other questions – is your freezer enabling you to cut down on other things – trips to the store, say? If you live in a place where you can walk to shopping, it is probably more efficient not to freeze, and to let commercial freezers do the work. If you live far from the store, the gas you save may balance out the effect. Or, can you, as we do, use your freezer to help get rid of your fridge? We use ice packs from our freezer to enable to turn off our fridge, making a substantial savings in wattage, since chest freezers are generally much more efficient than your average fridge. Can you share a freezer with one or two other households? Divided between them, it might make sense.

But I really don’t want to encourage people to go out and begin relying on freezers if they don’t already have one, simply because the cost – economically and environmentally – is so very high. Moreover, in a freezer, your food is vulnerable in ways it isn’t in any other storage method.

Statistically, even when freezers are working, more than 20% of all food put in a freezer is lost to freezer burn and decay – so freezers are already a problem – too much stuff gets buried in the back or the bottom, and wasted. This problem can be reduced with good management, so IMHO, a commitment to a freezer means not letting things get wasted. There’s something particularly disturbing about burning coal to preserve food, only to throw it out. In contrast to the high rate of wastage associated with freezers (somehow people seem to think that freezing something puts it in permanent stasis, rather than merely retarding decay somewhat), home canned food gets wasted only 7% of the time.

But moreover, freezers are vulnerable to either localized (and by localized this can be as local as “my husband accidentally kicked the cord out and we didn’t notice until it was too late) or widespread power outages. The reality is that if you keep food in your freezer, sooner or later, you will probably have an extended power outage. Can you afford to lose hundreds of dollars worth of food? Only you can answer that question, but for many people, the real problem of the freezer is that you can’t afford the potential loss.

One possible way of mitigating this problem is to be good at pressure canning – if you have an alternate heat source, and are willing, when the power goes out, to spring into action to preserve anything that can be preserved, probably by pressure canning (dehydration would be great, but often when the power is out, the weather is not conducive to solar dehydration, and your electric one won’t work ). This is a lot of work – it is our backup strategy – in our case, since most of what we store is our meat supply at the end of the butchering season, I know those chickens and turkeys will simply be canned, and am reasonably sure of not losing them. But then again, I have a wood cookstove, a supply of wood, and experience pressure canning.

Now I like a lot of foods better frozen than other methods of preservation – but then again, I like the layered eggplant casserole at the expensive italian restaurant better than I like my own version, but life’s like that sometimes . And since I like fresh and root cellared food even better than frozen vegetables and meat, the solution for me personally is to try more season extension, to root cellar more and better, and to grow more animal feed so that some of my chickens can be kept over the winter and butchered as needed.

For the moment, we’re keeping the freezer, but I admit, I’m ambivalent about our own use of it (primarily to sell meat off the farm) and about recommending freezing to anyone. Yes, if you already have a freezer, and are going to run it, you might as well run it full. But would I recommend people go out and buy a chest freezer? I don’t think so – too much embodied energy, too high a cost, too much dependence on fossil fuels, too many other alternatives. I can justify ours because of our profession, and also because our net energy consumption (because we’ve been able to get rid of our fridge) is lower, but the next step is freezer-free.

28 Responses to “Freezing…and Why Not To”

Well,three families eat out of our garden and freezer….we can hundreds of jars but some things are just better frozen…like meat. I don’t want to eat stew all the time. Sometimes I want a burger or a steak or a chicken breast. Our huge freezer is well-organized and we shop monthly or less.

An extended power outage would be handled by the generator powered by our tractor..as is the well and enough lights to feel safe. Living in the way boonies we can’t run to town daily and we try to be as self-sufficient as possible. DEE

I’d like to think that our freezer helps us eat local (side of beef bought from a farm just a few miles away) and keeps me from shopping more than once every 10 days. We’re prepared for a power outage. I do need to practice with that pressure canner this growing season.

I’m sadly, and still ambivalently, in the process of going freezer-free.

We’re in hurricane territory and have lost a full freezer’s worth of food at least twice in the last 10 years. Insurance covers $500 of that, but that’s not the full amount lost, and covered or not it’s still waste.

After Katrina we went a few years without using the freezer (an upright, and stored in a hot garage, so not high on the efficiency scale). Then I got to the point about a year ago that I just had to have my freezer back.

I needed the freezer because I was freezing more produce from the farmer’s market, garden, or even grocery story, and also meats and prepared meals, trying to reduce waste, save money, use cooking time efficiently, store the special flours and other products that I need for my wheat-allergic diet, and have something always available to eat when I wasn’t up to cooking (I have an illness that flares up without warning).

Now that I’m trying to reduce our energy demand, footprint, bills, etc., and entering the next hurricane season, I’ve decided to once again give up the freezer, and am working down the inventory.

But for all the reasons I started the freezer up again, I’m not real happy about giving it up.

Yet, every time I think about the next step in reducing our footprint, I think of that freezer.

So I bought a pressure cooker and am going to start canning some vegetables, meat and pre-made meals (soup, etc.) to have as ready-use food and food storage.

I think about the heat in this deep-south house already this spring (we keep the air conditioner at about 80 degrees now, but it still runs a lot of the time for much of the year in this climate), and the heat and humidity that regular canning is going to add, and I wonder again if I’m doing the right thing.

I have an electric stove, coal-fired electricity, and from what you say this is probably the better option, though as you say I do like many frozen foods better than what I can.

I’m no where near ready to give up a fridge, though, so I guess I’ll learn to manage every centimeter of my fridge freezer and suck it up for the canning project.

Tears for the freezer, but then aren’t we spoiled? Time to save the planet.

The fridge is off but the small newish freezer is still going. We get farm meat every so often so it is useful and most of what is in it otherwise can be canned if necessary. Electricity is all hydro round here so I’m not too worried yet.

One thing – there is a need to replace the lids of jars which are not reusable in canning – any suggestions?

We’re not even that far along yet, living in a pretty stable region power-wise (so far) and only middlingly well prepared to do without when the crunch comes. As the two of us are still working 2.25 FTE, some things if they are going to be stored by either of us, they are going in the freezer.

I never tried drying (here in the rainy Northwest) till last year, but it went well, so we’ll expand in that direction — but the canning jars, which we kept full back in the Seventies, will have to wait awhile longer.

If I manage to retire this year, as hoped, we mean to pull down the unused upper stamping shed and build a PROPER cold-room. Then we’ll see!

We only have a small freezer, and we use it almost completely for things which are difficult to do any other way: keeping pre-made meals and leftovers (with 5 males in the house I guess you don’t have that problem Sharon!), freezing raspberries and blackberries, and keeping the freebie day-old baked goods we often get. If the power went out long enough to be a problem, I think we’d probably have a party and feed it to any hungry neighbours – of which there would be some by that time I’m sure.

We are going to be doing a lot more canning, and pressure canning, this year.

I lived without a fridge for several years in the UK. If you can shop daily, and use a wet cloth draped over stuff like milk to cool by evaporation, it’s doable.

We have a chest freezer, purchased not very many years ago. It’s an EnergyStar model, but yes, I have misgivings about it, even though I also love it. We use it to store a lot of home grown kale and chard – things I wouldn’t want to can or dehydrate – and we eat those a LOT during the winter months. We use it to store or homegrown, hand pressed apple cider too. No idea how we’d go about preserving that, other than turning it into hooch, without a freezer. We definitely save trips to the store (not walkable at all) because we have the freezer. These days we shop at a supermarket twice a month at most, and there’s less and less to pick up while we’re there. When the farmer’s markets start up soon, that may be a different story.

We don’t seem to have much risk with the power going out, because we’re on the same grid as a major hospital, with a transforming station right down the street. But still, I would love some way of not relying on electricity to store so much food. We’re working on getting a root cellar built in a corner of the basement before winter.

For a change, I’m going to have to go in the opposite direction from you this time, Sharon. I’d happily turn off my fridge, and we’ve talked about it (my husband is resistant), but the one thing I say I want some solar backup for is our freezer. It’s just too huge a part of allowing us to eat as locally as we do. It’s huge for allowing us to buy local, ecological meat (the only kind we eat) when it’s available, and we use it to freeze copious amounts of local fruit in season, which is basically the fruit we eat all winter–a fair bit we dry, but that’s limited in its uses, and I consider canned fruits to be desert items, pretty much, even with minimal sugar. We don’t freeze a lot of veggies, though…I agree that there are better ways for dealing with veggies.

In the year and a half since we bought our Energy Star chest freezer, I think the only wastage we’ve had has been from failed experiments–things we just turned out to really not like much–and very little of that. Personally, I would lose washer, drier, dishwasher, fridge, microwave…almost everything, really…before I’d turn off the freezer.

Our chest freezer is the only way I can think of to store the two hogs, 50+ Cornish Roasters, and with luck, a deer for the season. Also, we freeze bulk butter, our own green beans, cauliflower, brussels and so forth. We have a commercial vaccume sealer and properly sealed, our frozen foods last a remarkably long time. We also have a 6500kw backup generator for times like our recent ice storm. Of course, we also can all of our tomato products made from the garden… spagh sauce, salsa, pizza sauce, stewed toms… I consider my freezer an essential part of my preparedness system. Wife & I haven’t had to drive to the mega grocery store in over three months, we must be saving at least ’some energy’ not driving there every week.

Dang it Sharon!
You always seem to post about things on my mind. The archdruid recently had a post where he suggested a path of learn one skill, save one thing, and leave one thing behind, and after a lot of thought I decided to start learning how to live without my monster freezer. I gotta say, I was an early member of the OAMC list, (cook for a day eat for a month), and I love it, and even expanded it to “cook for a weekend, eat for 3mos, shop quarterly”. Here in Tasmania, we have Hydro power (theoretically), but we have a mild enough climate to harvest veg year round (with careful planning). Our new house will be off grid, and the freezer is expensive in power. OTOH, pressure canning is virtually unheard of in Oz, and I would have to order the kit from USA (doable), but all future replacement parts would also have to come from USA (questionable). Fruit I can bottle (can) in Fowlers jars, vegies I can manage, but I have trouble figuring out life without frozen homemade stock. Im actually cosidering a couple of small non compressor units (like for cars) to store fresh meat for a week or two, and my stock, of course.

When I lived communally and we had a huge garden to serve the group, we did lots of canning, and the commune still does.

But now, as a city dweller with a full-time job, it’s more of a stretch for me to do canning. So I’ve stopped, and we pretty much depend on the store now for canned food. In fact, about 5 years ago I gave away all my canning jars, something I now regret.

But as I expand our garden, I am thinking increasingly of drying, since it is something that can be done using solar energy, or supplemental electric if necessary.

Although we are not doctrinally vegetarian, we do not cook or eat meat at home. (If we could get ‘wild’ meat we might.)

So in terms of energy use, I think the two best bets are the ‘four-season harvest’ a la Eliot Coleman, or drying. Yeah, there are some things we might have to give up, but when energy gets a lot more expensive and short, we’re going to have to make lots of adjustments in our lives.

From the point of view of a single person with a 16 cu ft fridge/freezer, my freezer is a must-have, since, although I can walk to the corner store, and, theoretically, shop every day for dinner, did you ever try buying one chicken drumstick ?
They are always in “family packs”, so if I’m buying frozen, I have to store what I don’t use frozen, or potentially succumb to Salmonella.
Economies of scale are in the “family pack” too, so, although I can ask the butcher to wrap me up a single lamb chop, they will insist on using the same amount of plastic wrap as a four-pack, and bulk packs are often cheaper.
If I’m harvesting, say, blackcurrants, and there are more than I can eat on any given day, they go in the freezer too. I can then use them up over several weeks, if I don’t want to convert them to jelly (with all that added sugar). Jams and jellies are great for the winter, but, in summer, the whole fruit is much nicer, and hopefully all the good vitamins live on undamaged by heat processing.
So, while it is theoretically a great idea to do away with the freezer, I’m going to hang onto mine as long as possible, since, for me, the electricity is cheaper than the gas I would need for canning.
Last summer when a storm knocked out the electricity for a week, I managed to get the contents of my fridge/freezer into one cooler, with access to enough ice to keep mostly frozen, so nothing went to waste.

Canning lid question above — it is possible to order just the lids, without the jars. Canningpantry.com sells various sizes of lids.

Also in response to a comment above, I like kale fresh best of course, and freezing’s also an option, but dehydrating works too. I found that sometimes I like snacking on the dried pieces – they’re kind of crunchy and slightly nutty-tasting. But also pieces can be thrown into soup. No doubt it loses some of the nutrition, but kale is so chockful that there’s still some left. Nice versatile veggie.

Ann- I tried converting my top of the line SunDanzer freezer to a fridge- and gave up.

The problem was; when it started getting full (and it IS hard to manage fridge stuff in a chest) the walls of the machine would get so cold, and the movement of air inside would be so slow to equilibrate, that we consistently froze, and spoiled, materials that were close to the walls. Turn it down- stuff away from the walls would spoil.

Actually, Sharon- your deliberations are very good, but there is one thing you’re missing: it is POSSIBLE to build a refrigerator that is HUGELY more efficient than anything on the market at the moment. And nobody does.

Kind of screams “Business Opportunity!” to me.

a) double the thickness of the insulation; use of electricity will drop to something like 1/5. That was easy.

b) half the animal farmers in the country keep sperm frozen in liquid nitrogen. Essentially without electricity at all- they use Dewar flasks; vacuum insulated bottles. Could we make a vacuum insulated refrigerator/freezer? Of course we could. It would be very expensive to build- but it could also be built to last 150 years. Easily.

I’m thinking of moving to the freezer/no fridge method soon and was wondering what kind of cooler to use? Make something really insulated myself or buy something? I’m trying to think through the options instead of my usual jump and flounder method.
(I have milk that needs more cooling than evaporative cooling would work in Texas in the summer. But don’t want to freeze it-I need it liquid for my oatmeal in the morning.)

I’ve been so tempted to buy an additional freezer too. Right now I have a ginormous side by side in my kitchen and it is chock full on the freezer side which keeps it very efficient. And I have to say, being able to have some crisply delicious eggplant in March because I stored it in the freeze is far more appealing than those rehydrated lumpish things that I can use only for stews!

But, in principle I agree with you so I haven’t made the freezer buying leap. I water bath can, pressure can or dehydrate a good 90% of what I don’t eat fresh and am just having to learn what to do with them in those forms.

We purchased a very small (4 cu. ft) many years ago, and as we have become more and more food self sufficient it simply is not enough space. Plus, the basket broke long ago, and we do find that we ‘lose’ things at the bottom that end up going to waste. Not so with the new one; it has dividers and we plan to label each divider with what will go where. We will be purchasing a side of beef to store, as well as whole chickens from local producers. In the spring I hope to purchase a couple of lambs for meat as well.

I do plan to purchase a small solar array to power the freezer from. It will be the only thing in the house off grid permanently.

We live 35 miles from the nearest grocery store, and 49 miles from the coop so anything that helps keep the driving down is a good thing. I think it balances out for us, and if gas prices rise it will even be on the positive side of the balance sheet.

Our old freezer we have decided to keep, convert to a fridge, and use it to ‘root cellar’ our potatoes, carrots, yams, etc. It’s the only way we can keep that stuff through the winter, it simply doesn’t get cold enough for long enough here otherwise.

I’m pretty new to having a freezer actually- it’s a super-efficient 12 Volt SunDanzer that runs off my off-grid power supply. The first year I had it I didn’t get the temp cold enough and the food was spoiled, but this year I figured it out and everything stores really well in there.

I am finding it to be very useful- with a small household it is way more efficient to cook an entire caserole and freeze several portions which I can then thaw out as needed, take with me for lunch at work etc. I can store fruit- blueberries, strawberries, etc, leafy greens, extra bread and all sorts of goodies. I find it to be very efficient actually as I live far from stores. I think it will actually improve my eating habbits and even save energy costs as well as prevent me from wasting food. Could I do without it? Sure- I did all these years, but I am enjoying having it to use I have to admit.

Our family gets most of our meat wild during hunting season. When the husband brings home an entire elk, there’s just no where we could keep it besides the freezer. I don’t think we could afford to eat without it actually.

We freeze some veggies and I am getting better at learning to can (though we’ve had some *interesting* tasting pickles before), I’m comfortable dehydrating or root celaring most of the veggies we don’t eat fresh.

I am bothered by the amount of energy it take to run the freezer. We were just offered a second chest freezer for free, but it is an older model, and I can’t see the need for it (and it’s energy consumption) unless Hubby decides to harvest a buffalo this year and we need to store the whole thing before selling shares to our yuppie friends.

The nice thing about where we live is that the most likely time for a power outtage here would be winter during a blizzard… so the freezer would have no trouble staying frozen. And our neighbor does have a generator that would be able to keep both our households fed (between his energy and our food, that is).

I see all your points in this post. But I just don’t know how my family would manage without our freezer.

I like my freezer. I buy beef once a year, from a farmer, and it’s a good long drive to pick it up. I can time shift some of the jam making from the summer.

The freezer is not a perfect solution. I lost last year’s green beans to a power outage and I still have a few chickens stuck to the bottom of the freezer in an inch of frozen raspberry puree, but it still cuts way down on shopping.

I live in the middle of a city. I can’t smoke fish and meat in my scrap of a backyard. I actually know a Salish Indian guy who tried, noop, his neighbors called the fire department. Every time.

I have been places where the meat preservation issue is solved by letting the chickens wander around in the street until needed, even in urban areas. Not happening here, at least no time soon. Some places where I’ve lived, I could go down to an open air market and buy a freshly killed chicken once a week. Chicken man would blowtorch off the pin feathers and then the chicken had to go right in the pot because it wouldn’t keep even in the fridge. I had a tiny refrigerator, horridly expensive electricity, and a freezer compartment large enough for a single carton of ice cream. It was fine, but then life was set up that way.

There is some danger of outrunning the available social engineering in all this. My mother used to go down the street to buy a live chicken from a neighbor in the middle of St. Louis in the forties. We may get there again, but for now the best way for me to get happy local chickens is to buy a bunch and freeze them. It’s far better tasting and cheaper than buying one organic chicken at a time at the store, and besides, the store bought chicken is going to come frozen anyway.

The freezer is the answer, until such time as it isn’t. And I’m with squrrl above, I’d cut back other places before I’d give up the freezer.

My woodworking roommate made a custom rail-and-basket system for our huge chest freezer that came with the house. There were three levels of baskets, with bottom being deepest and top being shallowest. The rail frame allowed the baskets to slide left and right, exposing the baskets underneath. It worked extremely well until a power outage while we were out of town… After throwing everything away and finding the rail system somewhat moldy, we stopped using the freezer entirely. I still miss it some days.

A friend of mine has an upright freezer full of rabbit and deer hides waiting to be processed. It’s quite the sight – green beans on the top shelf, and furry piles on the rest of the shelves!

I’m with Sharon on this. I have not gotten into pressure canning as of yet, but have started dehydrating food as well as water bath canning. We use our freezer for very short term food storage, things we find on sale, some left overs and things like that. I also store my grains, seeds and flour in there during the hotter months. I just have a hard time mentally with the idea of relying on freezing foods in the long term.
We have thought of buying a chest freezer in the past but since we don’t actually have the space for one have not seriously looked into it. Living without one is workable for us in that it has forced us to think of and learn about alternative methods. My personal question then has become, why take it on if there are other ways? I do admit that the rationale presented in the comments here make sense though.

this was a synchronicitous post for me as well. We were offered an 18 c/f chest freezer for free, just when I had been pondering buying a $200, new, 7 c/f chest freezer to store our growing harvest of backyard produce.

I’m not sure if we’ll plug it in (though I’m off to google how to use a chest freezer as a fridge) but the young woman who gave us the freezer said that farmers in our area use non-working chest freezers for airtight grain storage. Just thought I’d toss that possibility out for anyone considering turning their freezer off…

The biggest lesson I’ve learn in our going-on-5-years @ Seven Trees is to diversify when it comes to growing and saving food. Some things you’ll try that don’t work or you don’t like (goats for instance), but if you limit yourself you can end up dependent on something that may be low-tech and sustainable, but still vulnerable to weather, varmints, etc.

We live in the Pacific Northwest where there are usually 7+ rainy months. Summers are “supposed” to be Mediterranean, but the past 2 years have been cold and wet. We lost entire crops of tomatoes and potatoes to blight in a wet summer, and can barely get greens & broccoli growing before they bolt in a hot summer. The same issues apply to rasing food for our livestock. So we’ve learned to be flexible, try everything, then stick with what works and streamline the process.

When it comes to food-keeping we root cellar in the garage (keeps potatoes perfect until April), store squash, garlic & onions in the pantry, pressure can certain veggies, meat, soups & chicken stock, water-bath can fruit products and tomatoes, dehydrate (electrically) lots of fruit & veggies, sun or air dry herbs, and freeze meats & bulk produce until we have time to process it further. One of my favorites is chard that I haev lightly blanched then frozen. I eat it all winter.

We live in an area with hurricane-force winstorms and hte power goes out for days. After a neighbor loaned us a generator our first year, we bought a small quiet sturdy one of our own. Not only will it keep our 2 steers frozen, but the generator itself has proven to be useful for powering the female-scaled power tools in areas too far for an extension cord.

Anyway….a freezer can be a vital component of food storage, but it shouldn’t be your only one.